I was trying to do a manual exposure blending of the shot below. it's made of 3 shots.
I was having a hard time figuring out two things.
1. Auto align layers
2. How to stack images.
I was able to stacked but Affinity auto blend it. That's not what I want. I just want to open the files in layers and blend them manually.
I asked in Affinity facebook group in a nice way, i got kicked out.

i'm a long time PS user and I just did the retouching on Affinity the way I do in PS.
Cleaning blemishes using healing brush tool
pixel level dodging and burning using 2 curves layer(not contouring)
Toning using selective color adjustment layers. Adjusting the red, yellow and black colors only.
was using CaptureOne to develop.
here's the SOOC

Thanks for all the replies.
I'm shooting with Sony A7RII and one of the advantage of having it is it's ability to pull shadows and highlights. It's like HDR technique is a thing of the past. So pulling shadows is really important to me. in fact here's another sample of a file from a 1" sensor sony P&S(Sony RX100V)
i know this is an extreme example but i did that on purpose.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/49225452@N08/31483711682

even at 50% in AP you start to see the bad effects. try it yourself. that's not good especially for landscape photographers. New sensors can push that much especially Sony Cameras so this shadow recovery must yield a good result.